I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

The iPad3: The Pros and Cons of the High-Resolution Screen

According to MacRumors, they have confirmation that the next generation iPad will have a retina display with four times the pixels (2048 x 1536) of the current iPad2. Do we need that many pixels in a tablet? Not necessarily, but Apple clearly needs to demonstrate that they can continue to remain ahead of competing tablets. Taking a page from the digital camera playbook they are throwing pixels at the problem. I think there are some benefits and some drawbacks to the plan. Here’s a score card:

Pros:

Unbelievably vivid images: At more than 200 pixels per inch, the retina display will give photographs a life-like level of detail. And the rumored 8 megapixel camera will be a ready source for such images.

Electronic paper: Ink on paper is generally at 300 dots per inch, but given the physical properties of printing (i.e., schemer) the super crisp 264 ppi display (not quite as high as the iPhone 4GS’s 326 ppi) will have print quality resolution. Digital magazine publishers (and their advertisers) will love this.

Home Theater in Your Lap: Assuming the chip can support it (which the rumored quad-core A6 processor would) this screen can display full 1080 HD movies (1920 x 1080 pixels) with room for navigational chrome.

The Rise of Responsive: The higher damands of a subset of mobile devices will quicken the development of responsive web design, particularly in terms of the variable delivery of images based on device pixel dimensions.

Cons:

Your (No Longer Unlimited) Data Plan: Since providers have been phasing out unlimited data plans it is likely that you will be feeding all those pixels from a metered dataplan. Ouch!

The Rising Cost of Media: If content producers heed Neil Young’s seemingly contradictory defense and assault on piracy—high resolution media, whether music or movies or images—will cost more—and people will buy it, selectively. Like font designers who are finally getting paid because of the increased use of web fonts, hopefully photographers will find a resurgence in the demand for high-quality photography once everyone is walking around with high-resolution displays. (This is a pro within the con, at least for pros.)

That Giant Sucking Sound: Where, exactly is all this bandwidth going to come from? How much of the earth’s energy will be devoted to the additional server farms required to deliver all of this glorious resolution? Who’s going to pay for it? Ultimately we all are, I’m afraid.

Copyright Concerns: Take Pinterest, for example. If third party websites make high-resolution copies of all of the image that their users post (as Pinterest does) the possibilites of copyright infringement go up exponentially. Relative to the rising cost of media (above) one can imagine content producers giving away low-resolution proxies of their work for free but charging for the high-resolution experience. But what happens as those high-resolution files fall out of their owners control?

There are many opportunities that will be created by heightening consumer’s desire and demand for higher-resolution content experiences, but as in space, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so tighten your seat belts and hang on!

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This was one of the dumbest technology posts I have ever read. Here is the condensed version of the above article. PROS: The new display, and the iPad 3 hardware in general, will likely be better in every way. This will enable content developers to innovate and create in ways we have never seen before. CONS: There is NOT an unlimited iPad data plan and there still won’t be. (Most ridiculous CON ever, btw.) And the remainder of the cons fall in this vein, Apple created demand for a tablet by making one that was useful. There were tablets before the iPad, but no one cared. Now, without letting their would be competitors catch up, Apple may introduce technology that changes the game again. Boo-hoo! When did progress become a CON?

Michael, thanks for the strong reaction. People don’t feel neutral about Apple, so by doing a PRO vs. CON piece I realized that I might raise some ire. First, your condensation of the Pros is accurate and the reason why people are so devoted to their Apple products (myself included). But it’s not the progress that’s the Con, but the implications of the user behavior engendered by the progress. I may be dumb, but at least I am attempting to be farsighted in my dumbness! Look at my prior response to cbinc for some details about why the data usage will change based on the pixel density.

Forbes should not be a party to Apple’s misleading advertising ‘Retina’ display hoax. The resolution, even in the rumoured doubled pixel density, is well above dynamic foveal resolution, Wikipedia argumentation notwithstanding.

It’s obviously a slow news day and you put zero thought into your arguments because you make little sense. With the exception of streaming video, most apps do not require constant sending of data once its been installed. The resolution of the display does not affect data transfer.

As for video content; just because you have a higher resolution image does not mean that content magically becomes larger. Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, and all the other video app providers will still push their content at the same resolution.

Lastly, where have you been for the last 15 years? Copyright issues have been an ongoing problem, it’s ridiculous to think that adding a few vertical and horizontal lines to the iPad will change this issue in any way. In closing, you’re an idiot.

Have a look at Luke Wroblewsky’s discussion of RESS (Responsive Design + Server-Side Components, http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1392) to see how cutting edge developers will be serving different assets to different screen resolutions. Once there is a new mobile screen standard we will start serving those screens in the most optimal way we can. And I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to say that uploading higher resolution images, as the default, creates a different environment for copyright infringement. If Apple builds it, people will use it. And if people use it companies will support it in new ways. So my point is just to look, however nonsensically, at what the implications might be if we were all carrying around more pixels with us everywhere every day.

As someone who has bought a significant amount of stock photography and commissioned a significant amount of design work, I have never encountered the idea that an image’s rights could or should be related to its resolution. Naturally if you own the rights to an image you will want to retain those rights regardless of what resolution it’s transmitted/displayed at. Do you have ANY rationale for expecting this to change in the future?

Mot, honestly I think perhaps there should be some kind of scheme where higher resolution media of all kinds would be more valuable and the rights more stringently managed than low. Copyright is copyright, independent of resolution, but there are so many way of sharing media now that infringe by default and ask permission later if at all, that the pattern of actual use runs counter to the laws intent. It’s a particularly tough issue for photographers who have seen the value of their stock images plummet because of the glut of “good enough” imagery “freely” available on the web. I am hoping that higher resolution devices begin to bring that value back, but it is very tricky territory.

Almost all stock photography/graphics available on the web (free or otherwise) are available at ultra-high resolutions and have been for the past 10+ years, because there has always been the possibility of using the photos for print work (which, as you point out in your article, is still at higher resolutions than a potential iPad retina display). All of the rights issues, if there ever were any, were hammered out long ago.

Second, the vast majority of iPad pixels are not “fed” with a data plan. Just think about how many things you do with your phone or tablet that require (or even support) high resolution images. E-mail? No. Web surfing? No. Games? No, not after you install them. Netflix and other streaming video services wouldn’t be able to send HD video through your data plan anyway, 3G isn’t fast enough, so you’ll get the same data stream that you got with an iPad 1/2. That brings up an interesting point, about half of iPads are wifi-only, so data plan quotas don’t even come into the question.

Too bad, when I clicked on this article I was hoping for an intelligent discussion about the component cost of a retina display, or the tradeoffs between power consumption and graphics processing power, etc.

Mot, thanks for the correction on the ppi specs. I found a reference and made the correction to the post. As far as all the rest, yes, I realize that it’s only the consumption of certain kinds of content in certain situations that really strain the bandwidth. The point here was not hardware specs and considerations but the implications on the way people will consume content in the near future, both on this device from Apple and others that will follow after. Developers and publishers are thinking about how to create optimal experiences for any and every new screen and there’s no telling how people will use these screens in the wild. Apologies if you were looking for something more technical.